Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com> writes: The Nuriweiller wrote:
if so, they are not SCIENTISTS. a key aspect of SCIENCE is publishing results. science cannot advance without it. name me one scientist who did not publish an important result, or is considered a good scientists for doing so!
I must agree here. If a technologist (ie one who studies science for profit, hence creating a technology) chooses not to publish their results that is fine. However, a scientist is one who studies nature and its interactions, profit is not and should not be a motive. Simplistic or not; in fact some things are better understood when simplified (ala the scientific principle). A scientist has an obligation to discuss and publish their results for other scientists (and even technologist) when they are reasonably sure their results will stand up to indipendant verification (a critical issue in science, not in technology however).
Don't be confused by Timy's claim to be a scientist, he is a technologist at heart. Many of his views and beliefs are motivated by issues of control *not* curiosity.
That's a very interesting idea. Consider Fischer Black, who passed away a couple of years ago. His most important contribution to science was the basic Black-Sholes equation. What were his direct economic rewards for having come up with it? Not much, really. He was already a tenured full professor at MIT. However as the result of his discovery he got hired away by Goldman Sachs as a VP, and later became a full partner. He did quite a bit of work at GS; none of it as spectacular as the Black-Scholes equation; almost none of it published in the open literature. Can we say that the bulk of his $50 million was for the research he did while at MIT and not at Goldman (and which benefited everyone in the industry, not just Goldman)? Did Goldman bet that Black would deliver results comparable in importance to the B-S equation, which Goldman would keep proprietary? Did Goldman win this bet (meaning, we wouldn't really know if they did)? I know another guy whom I won't name because he's still alive. He too is a tenured professor and has published numerous papers in refereed journals. His results are used by many people in the financial industry to make money. A few years ago he made an interesting discovery in statistics. Instead of publishing it, he and his coauthor took it to some investors and showed them how to make lots of money trading on these results. The investors then said, basically: yes we signed a nondisclosure agreement, but now that we know what this is about, we're going to use it and we won't pay you a penny and you don't have the money to sue us. Which is precisely what happened; the result is still not published, but is slowly circulating through the quant investing community. The same guy informed me later that he discovered a closed-form solution to some very interesting problems 9related to Black-Scholes) which according to the open literature either can't be done accurately at all, or require incredible amounts of cpu time for monte carlo simulations. he doesn't wish tio publish it (although it would make him quite a celebrity) and now he's going crazy trying to figure out a way to sell it in such a way that he can't get screwed again. How would crypto help if at all? Oh and by the way I suspect that a few minor crypto ideas in my PhD thesis were known to certain British cryptographers in the 30s but never published in the open literature. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps